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Hamlet Revenge Theme

Introduction

Hamlet is a tragic play written by William Shakespeare. It was composed between 1599 and 1601. Hamlet, prince of Denmark, was William Shakespeare's most fascinating hero. The play recounts how Prince Hamlet took revenge from his uncle Claudius for murdering his father and taking the throne by marrying Hamlet's mother (Campbell, p.157). The work outlines vividly about the madness (both real and fake) and the passage of the boundless deep pain and anger. It also explores the themes of revenge, incest, betrayal and moral corruption. The paper investigates a specific critical approach to Shakespeare play 'Hamlet'.

Discussion

Hamlet has been inquired critically over time. The character of Hamlet has been among the most studied creations of Shakespeare. Intellectual, self-reflective, alienated and apparent by doubts about Hamlet and also the circumstance in which he is called upon to act as an agent of revenge. Hamlet has been considered as the typical modern hero (Grene, p.106).

Grene asserts that Hamlet lacks the strong markings which commonly form the chief modern celebrity in a tragedy. According to Guthrie, Hamlet's doubts and perplexities only serve to indicate how much he is like his fellow man. Thus, Guthrie praises Hamlet's ordinariness, an opinion that runs counter to the ideas of most subsequent critics, who focus on Hamlet's unique qualities. According to Grene, Hamlet is not absorbed in the antic role's viewpoint, partly sincere and partly put on could tend to blur his emotional reality for himself and turn him into a person who self-consciously performs his emotions. Knight's modernist critical aesthetics have very little to do with determining such a radical interpretation of Claudius. Rather, his personal representation of Claudius in "The Embassy of Death" can best be understood in the context of several disquisitions on kingship in criticism of this period (Grene, p.113).

Knight states positively that the message that Shakespeare's plays must communicate to Britain is not the choice between power and the absence of power, but between royalty in the Shakespeare sense and oppression (Epstein, p.192). As Wilson Knight's, John Kerrigan also argues that revenge in the body of the play, is far less important to Hamlet than the desire of the throne. As a revenge tragedy, Michael Neill sees Hamlet as extending the genre to expose the terrible power of memory.

Knight's reading of Hamlet anticipates the premise of Terence Hawkes when he states the critical situations that constitutes of the means by which it is possible to see the past and perhaps comprehend it. It is perhaps an indication of independence and originality of Knight's criticism that his methodology and his critical aesthetics have been espoused by latter-day critics of quite different ideological persuasions.

This diagnosis of Hamlet's state of mind appears to lead to the strange moral reversal of the protagonist and antagonist (Bowers, p.85). Hamlet is an ambassador of death spreading destruction wherever he goes while Claudius is a kind and a confident man and shows every sign of being an excellent diplomatist and king. Thus, Hamlet is first ...